cia

In my October rabble column, I spoke about the horrible treatment of Abu Wa'el Dhiab, one of the Guantanamo detainees who was abusively force-fed by his American guards to dissuade him from continuing his two-year-long hunger strike. In that article, I wrote that Abu Wa'el Dhiab was another example of the collateral damage of the War on Terror, and indeed he was, as U.S. officials proved recently.

Don't

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald

(Metropolitan Books,

2014;

$27.00)

Way back in July 2000, the Wall Street Journal, reporting on revelations and rumors about NSA snooping, offered the following:

"The granddaddy of all bogus fears, though, is Echelon. If you believe some European Union parliamentarians, the United States and Britain operate an international network that monitors virtually all communications, and extracts choice nuggets with powerful computers that recognize key phrases in messages like 'assassination,' 'terrorist attack' or 'industrial secret.'"

Don't

"What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said last month in what was, then, her routine defence of the mass global surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies. All that has changed now that she believes that the staff of the committee she chairs, the powerful, secretive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was spied on and lied to by the CIA. The committee was formed after the Watergate scandal engulfed the Nixon administration. The Church Committee, led by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, conducted a comprehensive investigation of abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, of everything from spying on anti-war protesters to the assassination of foreign leaders.

Operation Peter Pan, the Estela Bravo documentary screening at the CineCuba film festival, tells the story of the "airlift" of 14,000 children from Cuba at the height of the Cold War. In 1961 and 1962 these children were flown out of Cuba, ostensibly to save them from communist indoctrination. Some never saw their families again. Many never saw Cuba again.

Though the justification for the actual Operation Peter Pan was the protection of children and parental rights, in reality it destroyed both.

It is a phenomenon rarely noted that virtually every left-wing government since the Second World War, almost all of them elected, has faced vicious, sometimes violent, obstruction by its enemies both internal and foreign. Many were overthrown. As Henry Kissinger explained just before the American-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, "The issues are too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Not surprisingly, the histories of all such governments have, for better or worse, been deeply influenced by such hostile interventions.

By the sound of it, the international observers of Sunday's Ukrainian parliamentary elections did manage to catch the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovich getting up to some undemocratic naughtiness.

Their report, which the international media yesterday described as scathing, accused Yanukovich's Party of Regions of unfairly benefiting from excessive money from supporters, abuse of government resources to make it look good and heavily biased media coverage in its favour.